European Rebuffs Strengthen Erbakan Dreams of Closer Islamic Ties

by James Dorsey

Feeding on growing anti-Western sentiments at home, Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan is balancing on a tightrope as he shifts his country’s focus eastward without surrendering its long-standing Western ties. In doing so, Erbakan, a fiery politician whose Refah (Welfare) Party came to power last June dreaming of an Islamic world order, is keeping Western capitals as well as his own country’s staunchly secular elite on their toes.

As a result, German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel recently warned publicly that Erbakan’s Turkey was moving away from the West and toward closer ties with its Muslim neighbors out of deep disappointment with the European Union’s failure to help it.

“Turkey feels that it is wrongly treated by Europe,” Kinkel said. He noted that Erbakan and other Turkish leaders have complained bitterly to the European Union that their country has received no benefits from a new customs union with the EU because Greece has blocked giving it funds linked to the trade deal.

Reflecting growing strains in Turkey’s relationship with the West, Erbakan recently reiterated his dream of heading a Turkish-led global Muslim order in a rare interview with a foreign journalist. “We feel the world has to be reshaped,’’ he said.

That is what does not sit well with Western leaders. Although they may not share Erbakan’s belief that Turkey is the center of the world, they do recognize the country’s key geopolitical position at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk pursued his own dream of Western acceptance by establishing a secular government in the early 1920s, the West increasingly has counted on Turkey to help counterbalance the region’s rising Islamist character.

But now Erbakan is putting that relationship in doubt. In campaigning for the premiership, he called for an Islamic United Nations, an Islamic NATO and the introduction of an Islamic currency in Turkey. In winning the election in June, he became Turkey’s first prime minister primarily motivated by Islamist politics.

To be sure, much of Erbakan’s rhetoric is just that. And like all Turkish politicians, he must cope with the country’s powerful military organization, which is committed to Kemalism and is capable of intervening when secularism is threatened. Moreover, since coming to power in a coalition with the center-right True Path Party headed by Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller, Erbakan has been careful not to tangle with the secular character of the Turkish state.

Erbakan’s anti-Western nationalism strikes a chord with many Turkish citizens

In fact, his actions often speak louder than his words, as when he recently sealed a major trade deal with Israel, or when Refah helped to push through a parliamentary vote that allows U.S. and allied planes to continue to use the Incirlik airbase in Turkey for patrols over the Kurdish region in northern Iraq from which Iraqi military flights are banned.

But the big question for Western analysts is whether Erbakan is using the occasional pro-Western gesture to mask a deliberate reorientation toward the East. If he is, the West may alter its own approach to its Turkish ally. “He’s a fundamentalist and an extreme nationalist,’’ one West European diplomat claims. “If we want Turkey to be oriented toward the West, he is the wrong man.’’

Since coming to office, the Turkish prime minister has visited only Islamic countries, including such political pariahs for the West as Iran, Libya and Nigeria. He even skipped an invitation to dine with European Union leaders during their summit in Dublin last month. Instead, Erbakan spent the time preparing for the four-day official visit of Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani to Turkeya visit that irked the U.S.

Erbakan views himself as a champion of Muslim-led countries in the Mideast, Africa and Asia that are seeking to negotiate a fairer deal with the industrialized world. “That is the political meaning of my visits to Asia and Africa,’’ he says in response to U.S. criticism of his improved relations with Iran. He argues further that Turkey can only narrow its $20 billion trade deficit and secure badly needed energy supplies by improving its economic ties to other predominantly Muslim nations, including Pakistan and Indonesia.

The Letter of the Law

Erbakan visited Tehran in July to conclude a $20 billion gas-supply dealless than a week after U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law restrictions on U.S. and non-U.S. companies making energy investments in Iran. U.S. officials concede privately that the deal does not violate the letter of the U.S. law, under which any investment of $40 million or more in Iran’s energy sector triggers sanctions. That’s because the Iranians and the Turks each will build their own part of the gas pipeline.

Erbakan’s anti-Western nationalism strikes a chord with many Turkish citizens, who feel rejected in their country’s efforts to be recognized as an equal partner in its alliance with Europe and the U.S. “Erbakan is scoring domestic brownie points, right, left and center,” says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Istanbul Bilgi University.

“Erbakan is capturing the latent unhappiness that permeates Turkish society about its relations with the West,” politicial scientist Ilter Turan says, echoing Turkish perceptions that the United States and Europe favor Greece in its perennial dispute with Turkey, as well as fears that the West may be using the Kurds to weaken Turkey.

And that is what worries Western governments and secular Turks. They know only too well that many analysts, including some of Mr. Erbakan’s own aides, are predicting that the prime minister will this year call an early election that could return him to power at the head of either a single-party government or a coalition in which he wields more power than he does today.

“Erbakan is heading straight for early elections in 1997,’’ Ozel says. “He’s trying to win votes with populist economic measures,’’ adds a European diplomat.

Erbakan categorically denies that he intends to call an early election. “There is no need to do so,’’ he says. “We already are in power.’’

Yet, with Turkey’s center-right, traditionally the country’s largest voting bloc, weakened in disarray, Erbakan’s Refah Party is poised to become Turkey’s foremost conservative political force, just as is the case with the Christian Democrats in various European countries.